Upgrade

Recently updated to Windows 10, version 1809, removed the Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) that were previously installed. This is common with such updates, however, this time around I was unable to reinstall the tools. After much digging, I discovered that this is because Microsoft has made the RSAT tools a part of the “Features on Demand” in Windows 10.

Recently my team and I ran into incident with and error while patching esxi servers using VMware Update Manager(VUM). When attempting o remediate the following error message was shown:

“cannot remediate host because it is part of HA Admission Control enabled Cluster”

Cause:

vCenter Server uses admission control to ensure that sufficient resources are available in a cluster to provide failover protection and to ensure that virtual machine resource reservations are respected.

Admission control imposes constraints on resource usage and any action that would violate these constraints is not permitted. If an automated process needs to take actions, it might temporarily violate the failover constraints.

Solution:

Before patching of the ESXi Servers that are part of the HA Cluster, make sure you have disabled “Admission Control”. Once server has been patched you can re-enable Admission Control on the cluster.

Steps to disable Admission Control

Right-click the cluster and click Edit Settings.

Under Cluster Features, click VMware HA.

Under Admission Control, select Disable: Power on VMs that violate availability constraints.

Click OK

This can also be disabled in the VMware Update Manager remediation wizard. When you remediate check the option “Disable High Availability admission control if it is enabled for any of the selected clusters.

If you have a need to upgrade a server running Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard to either the Enterprise, or Datacenter edition, it’s possible to do so online, without re-installing Windows. This not only a simple process, it saves you time.

Open an elevated command prompt and type DISM /Online /Get-CurrentEdition. This returns the current Windows version.

Type DISM /Online /Get-TargetEditions to list the Windows editions to which this server can be upgraded to.

Type DISM /Online /Set-Edition:ServerDataCenter /ProductKey:xxxxxx will upgrade the operating system. All that’s required to complete the upgrade is a reboot.

There are two versions of the tool, one for a “32-bit operating system” and one for a “64-bit operating system.” To find out which you have, go to Start, type Control panel, select System and security, and then, under System, look at the value for System type:.

If your PC is a 32-bit operating system, on the Software download page, select Download tool now (32-bit version). If your PC is a 64-bit operating system, select Download tool now (64-bit version).

When you’re asked, select Run (or choose to Save the tool if you don’t want to run it now).

Run the tool

Run the tool, if you didn’t already select Run above. (You need to be an Administrator on the PC to run it.)

If you’re upgrading this PC, select Upgrade this PC now, and then follow the rest of the instructions to finish the upgrade.

If you want to create media for a different PC, select Create installation media for another PC. Use this table to choose the edition of Windows 10 that you want to create media for.